TED 2008: Irwin Redlener on surviving a suitcase nuke
(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Irwin Redlener, MD.
Irwin Redlener, MD is president of the Children's Health Fund spoke about how much loose nuclear material there is in the world, and how easy it is to make a suitcase nuke. Nuclear terrorism is probable, but survivable, he says. I missed most of his talk while typing up the last one (I'm sure Ethan Zuckerman will have a nice report on the talk). Here's a slide Redlener prepared on how to survive a nuclear attack.
the latest
latest episodes
Keep your mouth open. duh.
Keep mouth open? Does screaming "OH GOD, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" count?
Also: Go downwind? Isn't that the same direction the radioactive dust of death is going to go? Wouldn't it make more sense to travel upwind?
1. Bush can't get wiretapping renewed.
2. America is attacked with a suitcase nuke.
3. In the political fallout the lack of wiretapping is used to blame dems and delay the election:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3885663.stm
4. The process of the closing of an open society is rapily accelerated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0LvtQAQ6sc
5. Civil war ensues, world war comes after this.
6. Because everything happens in quantum physics, as the other TED talk claims:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/28/ted-2008-garrett-lis.html
an individual comes back from the survivors of this world to warn us of the impending future. His name is John Titor. His warning is ignored. The worldline is different each time. We are already saved by Titor, and we are already dead. He always knew he could only save some worldlines that listened to him. Do we listen in this one?
Find out next year, same worldline, same worldchannel.
I can has sci-fi book contract for my trouble?
oh, John Titor - Rotit, Rot-it, wrote-it... lotta johns out there
anyway, it is very important to keep your mouth open anytime you witness a flash event.
how "easy" it is to build a suitcase nuke?
some people in the arms control community might take issue with that:
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1703/suitcase-nukes
i dont doubt his advice is sound in the event of a nuclear explosion though.
I never said it would be a very good one, half a kiloton, max. You can't get the wood, you know.
Sloth- keeping your mouth open helps avoid ruptured eardrums from the overpressure when the blast wave hits.
Personally, if anything happens to the elections, I'm driving to washington, and I'm gonna be mighty PO'ed if there aren't a few million showing up with me.
Dave
anyways, dirty bomb survival would be a lot more useful and likely. Any bozo with hot material and any explosive can make one. Hell, don't even need a bang,just a grinder, fan and high place.
Some of this makes no sense whatsoever and some is contradictory.
#1 says keep your mouth open. #5 says keep your mouth covered.
#6 says decontaminate ASAP. However, if you keep your mouth open during the flash and the fallout how are you going to decontaminate the inside of your mouth and esophagus?! Opening your mouth increases your exposed surface area, sure just incrementally but more importantly, to include a vital organ function (respiration). Frankly, we have more concern from dirty nukes and everybody should have at least a surgical mask in their wallet/purse/car/home. Also get lab squirt bottles .
#4 says "Move downwind". Sure! Row, row, row your boat down the toxic stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream. NO, travel UPwind AWAY from where the fallout is being blown. Im amazed that such life-and-death info is not proofread before being disseminated
Seriously, why would you keep your mouth open?
Keeping your mouth open when the pressure wave hits might prevent your eardrums from bursting. Or just make it easier to start screaming.
To scream, "Oh, shit!"
Dirty bomb survival would go something like this.
1. Are you dead from the force of the explosion itself? If no, then
2. You have survived a dirty bomb, unless
3. You own property in the area, in which case you're probably looking at severe emotional distress.
But seriously, my dissertation is all about radioactive whatnot and how people react to it, and so I've been steeped in crazy bomb-lore for years, and I can't figure out why keeping your mouth open is important. So strontium-90 doesn't lodge in your nasal passages?
why don't you want to move upwind (rather than follow the fall-out "downwind)?
Pressure release to keep your eardrums from blowing out in the shock wave? Isn't that one of those tornado advice things?
thats got to be a typo. You'd want to avoid breathing in the particles of radioactive dust.
you equalize as much of the blast overpressure that is about to turn your lungs into strawberry jam, shatter your eardrums and cause your sinuses to go owie-owie. Light from the flash travels so much faster than the blast wave that you (if you are any distance away)do have that split second to ameliorate some of the damage to your breathing.
you equalize as much of the blast overpressure that is about to turn your lungs into strawberry jam, shatter your eardrums and cause your sinuses to go owie-owie. Light from the flash travels so much faster than the blast wave that you (if you are any distance away)do have that split second to ameliorate some of the damage to your breathing.
correction
"Don’t stare at the flash, keep your mouth open so your eardrums don’t burst"
oh, and yes, you should close your mouth afterwards.
The open-mouth method does not work well in instances say,where you are in a cave or bunker and an extremely large fuel-air hyperbaric bomb has just been detonated over you. An open mouth then just means you turn completely inside out instead of remaining a dignified flattened wad of skin. Important tip there.
What should I do with the soiled undergarments?
Use them as a handy respirator filter. If you get tear-gassed, you wet a handkerchief (and you wondered why I carry one) and hold it over your nose and mouth. If you don't have fresh water, use recycled. Solids - your on your own.
Franky I'm disapoointed by this and would expect better from an expensive conference like this.
The problem is that terrorists don't really even need to go to all the bother of engineering a nuke. Because what they do is make a bomb like Timothy McVeigh did and put in some junk from an old Xray machine inside the truck, and presto! You have everybody screaming about how they nuked us and then we have Patriot Act Deep Throat edition.
If I wanted to see something like this, I'd find those old "Duck and Cover" commercials floating around on Youtube.
finally! I knew college would come in handy for something!
As most of the people on here have figured out, nuclear terror isn't all that it is cracked up to be...
read my brief, yet informative, scholarly paper on this very subject here
Seriously, how did this guy get a TED talk...if he got one then I want one!
1. vaporize ...
I'm not so much concerned about how to survive the physical fallout from a suitcase nuke as I am about how to survive the political fallout from a suitcase nuke.
The single best work I know of on how to survive terrorist attacks, which is also the calmest work I know on that subject, is Words of Wisdom About Gas, Germs and Nukes by SFC Red Thomas, Armor Master Gunner, U.S. Army (ret).
Two from Making Light: Real emergency preparedness and Tips for an apocalypse.
Jim Macdonald's invaluable page about jump kits, a.k.a. go bags. His "Notes" section at the bottom is especially good.
Victor the Cook's annotations of Making Light's discussion of Jim Macdonald's page about jump kits.
San Francisco's emergency preparedness page.
The NYC Office of Emergency Management homepage. These guys know where their towel is, and have in-depth emergency plans for all your towel contingencies.
Ready New York, the NYC OEM's excellent public information site. Their preparedness guides (general, heat, kids, seniors and people with disabilities, hurricanes, businesses, pets, condensed pocket guide) aren't just useful to New Yorkers -- they contain a lot of good basic information.
See whether your own city or area has an emergency preparedness site.
If you want to get further into emergency survival gear (not "survivalism"; this is real kit for real events), Doug Ritter's Equipped to Survive is a no-nonsense site. It's instructive to compare their basic family 72-hour emergency kit, their full-scale earthquake & disaster preparedness kit, Doug Ritter's own personal Don't leave home without it list, and his supplementary Mini Survival Kit.
1. Sty sf dstnc wy frm Hllry Clntn, nd t lst 5 ft bv hr.
Cheap shot, Wareq.
these guys can tell you what it was like to be yards away from a nuclear blast and then walk through the hole
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran/
I'm very surprised that the TED conference would host a speaker who takes the idea of "suitcase nukes" seriously.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious issue. And the threat of loose nuclear weapons is real. But nuclear weapons require constant maintenance by a high-tech infrastructure. "Suitcase nukes" are a movie-plot device.